In which a pilot and author inflicts her opinions on the world….

Monthly Archives: February 2017

There’s lots of ways pilots can be elitist, from rattling off jargon in front of non-pilots, or turning their nose up at pilots who don’t do taildraggers/floats/grass runways/off-airport landings/aerobatics, to priding themselves on being able to identify plane models from a view of the inside of the cockpit or a small close-up of the rear landing gear.

I’m in a facebook group for taildragger pilots, and a little while ago, one of the older guys posted a little rant about how the younger generation doesn’t seem to appreciate the vintage aircraft the way the older generation does. He went on to complain that all the young guys getting into aviation, they were all going commercial, and didn’t appreciate just going out and flying for fun.

Okay, look. My wet dream as a pilot would be to find a Spitfire frame and restore it and fly that around. I would fly it around all over, and I’d fly it into controlled airspace just so that I could have air traffic control address me as Spitfire-whatever-my-civil-ident-was, and listen to them advise other aircraft that they had traffic wherever that was a Spitfire. Because come on, that would be frickin’ amazing, and I know that asshole in the Boeing 747 looking out for me would be in his fancy ass plane going seriously? Like, a Spitfire, Spitfire? OMG, that’s so cool!

I can’t picture myself ever having the money a) to buy the aircraft, b) to find somewhere to store it, c) to pay for the restoration, or d) to pay for the fuel and maintenance costs for an aircraft.

Warning – rant coming….

Look at that meme up above. Look at the assumptions it makes. It assumes that the reason I don’t have a porch to chat with my friends on is because I don’t know how nice it is to have one.

It assumes everyone reading it can afford a residence that has a front porch.

I live in an apartment. I grew up with both my mother and both my grandmothers keeping gardens. Do you know how much I’d love to have a yard? Frickin’ hell, yes, I’d love to have a yard, and a garden, and someplace to put the barbecue. I’d love to own a vintage aircraft.

This guy got a whole load of answers explaining the economic times for young people, but glancing at this meme the other day reminded me of something I notice a lot among General Aviation pilots.

They’re rich. They don’t think they’re rich though. They’re surrounded by other people who can afford to buy an aircraft that costs anywhere between twice as much as a car to twice as much as a house, and put-put it around for fun. And they don’t realize how broke other people are. They think they’re the norm.

This guy literally complained that all the young people getting into aviation were going commercial. When I looked at getting into aviation, I very quickly came to the conclusion that the only way to justify the expense flight training was going to be to make it a career. Because I would never have the money to fly as much as I would want to if I opened that pandora’s box.

A message to the baby boomer generation: the economics of my generation is a reality that I and others faced with it have been forced to accept. The cushy jobs that would carry us through college while working through the summer – those just straight up don’t exist anymore, and have been replaced with jobs that people sneer at us and belittle us just for being willing to take.

*sigh*

Look. If you people who can afford to maintain a vintage aircraft turn your nose up at me and mine for going commercial – arguably for taking aviation as seriously as it can be taken, then be prepared for us to roll our eyes at you. If you want to share your love of vintage aircraft with us, then take us with you on a flight. Teach one of us how to land your wwii aircraft. I would freaking’ love that.

We’re looking at a pilot shortage. A period where the military pilots that went commercial haven’t made a habit of letting the next generation fly to build up the hours of experience they need. Do you want to be one of those snooty pilots not passing on your skills and knowledge to the next generation? Do you want your legacy to die with you?

We want and value that knowledge. It’s just – we want food on the table an a roof over our heads too. I often feel like people over 40 think we’r exaggerating about the roof thing though. The vintage aircraft thing is a luxury. It’s a luxury we would treasure, but a luxury all the same. If you have a vintage aircraft, will it to someone who would appreciate it, huh?

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Usually my go to subgenre that I enjoy the most is secondary world fiction, because I like to be taken away to a different world. But often historical fiction set in far away countries can do the same thing, and this one takes you away to Ethiopia.

The main characters are a boy and a girl growing up together, who’s mothers, Rhoda and Delia, were the best of friends. Em’s father is largely absent, and Teo’s father died of an illness when he ws young, and so the two women have a sort of little combined family. The fact that one mother was white and the other was black never bothered them or their mothers, except when they reach America, where racism was what it was in the thirties.

The mothers are both pilots, and they’re a two-woman travelling flying circus, one flying, the other wing-walking. All this changes though after a bird strike kills Teo’s mother. That particular scene was heartbreaking to read – the whole story is told in the form of journal entries, flight log entries and letters written by the two children, and that scene, as it’s written, it’s so brief, as if they’re too heartbroken to dwell on it or put in any more detail.

To honour Delia’s dream, Rhoda takes both children to Teo’s father’s home country, Ethiopia.

It’s one of those books that paint a beautiful picture of a beautiful place, and I got settled into loving their new home, Beehive Hill. The descriptions of Christianity as it exists in Ethiopia was facinating, because it like nothing we’re familiar with in the west. It’s a branch of Christianity that split off before Catholicism existed, so while everything we’re familiar with is a product Catholicism’s evolution, the Coptic church is just completely different.

At this point in history, slavery in Ethiopia still exists too, with complicated laws governing it. In order to prevent a sudden economic crisis, it’s being phased out slowly, via various ways of slaves being freed.

All the while, news on the radio foreshadows the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

There’s something eerie about reading a story set in a place that exists though, and events that actually happened, even if the characters themselves are invented. I almost hate Italians now, have read about how they invaded Ethiopia, with the intention of pushing the Ethiopians out and take their land, to settle poor Italians there the way other countries settled their poor in the Americas. And how they used mustard gas to do it.

At about the half way point, I had to remind myself this is an author who kills main characters sometimes, so when the invasion started, I bit my lip to keep reading, not sure how many of these characters would make it out alive. I bet she feels magnanimous when she lets characters live.

Overall, wonderful book; if you like historical fiction and planes, definitely pick it up.

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Last year was a rough year. MIFR has taken a lot longer than I planned on it taking, and on the one hand I tend to be the first one to blame myself, but in truth, there’s been a lot of shit thrown in my way this year.

I’d been waiting for call volumes to go down and scheduling to be more flexible forever. At the beginning of the year I finally decided that I couldn’t keep waiting and hoping things at work would get better – I had to pick up flight training again, or I would never get out of my current job.

So I called up Harv’s Air and started sim training about once or twice a week. It was coming along, though my work schedule was unrelenting, but my spirits were up because I was finally back to making progress.

And then I pulled into the parking lot at Harv’s and looked at my phone before I went in, and got the message that my Grandma was dying. I rushed back home to be there when she died. Her death hit me hard – it wasn’t like most people losing a grandparent – this Grandma was a parent to me.

I got all of three days bereavement leave off work and went straight back into sim training, and right away after, started my multi rating. We had weather, and we had plane maintenance, and I was exhausted with my schedule at work, and I was ready to pull back and take a break. I was far enough into my multi rating though that my instructor said it was a bad time to take a break. I made it through my multi flight test.

So next was some brushing up on IFR, and then back in the plane for multi-engine instrument training. There was more weather. Planes went down for maintenance. But I had vacation coming up, and that was when I was planning on doing the last big push to finish up.

My vacation came – Somewhere in there I wrote the instrument rating written test and passed it. But I was running out of time. I asked my work for more time off. Unpaid now. I got it, two weeks, in fact.

Then the first of the two multi-engine aircraft the school trains with went down for maintenance, not just for a fifty hour inspection – something had to be done with the engines that involved them being sent away for maintenance. Two months of downtime. Which meant all the students booking on the second plane. The second one at one point was also down for a week for other maintenance issues.

Anyway, between my work schedule, weather, and plane maintenance, losing my Grandmother, among the biggest things but among a multitude of other stressors, I’ve been feeling very much like something just doesn’t want me to succeed. Like the end of the movie “The Labyrinth”, where David Bowie starts frantically sending everything he can to stop Sarah from making it the last little way to the castle.

Losing my Grandma affected me is ways I didn’t expect. But I was just less emotionally resilient than I normally am, and it made it harder to fight the inner voices one gets from having been a past victim of abuse. The fact that my work schedule isolated me from being able to spend time with the people I draw emotional support from made it worse.

But it’s not my instructor’s responsibility to be my therapist, and I did my best to not make excuses. I worked my way past it the only way I know how – stubbornly ploughing through head first.

I remember before I ever hopped into a plane to learn to fly, thinking about whether or not I was ready to do this. Because I was used to the way my life was – used to just never getting anything I want unless I’m ready to give it everything I’ve got and just refuse to give up.

I don’t know if it’s God, or the fates, or whatever, who’ve decided they don’t think I’ve been through enough, tried hard enough, worked hard enough, but I have something to say to them: I’m not the wilting teenager I once was that had so little confidence she would never have considered embarking on this journey in the first place. I look back on my teen age years and think, hell, I made it though that, I’ll make it through this too. If you want to break me, you’ll have to do better than this.